Path Lights

One day, a bottle almost hits us. It’s a brown quart bottle that falls out of the sky. We are in the arroyo, the dogs and me, walking.

They look at the bottle; they look at me. My first guess is that somebody threw it down from the rim of the arroyo. But then it would have bounced down the slope—it wouldn’t have stopped dead like this.

I think of the pilot tossing a Coke bottle from a plane in the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” But, as a detective once told me, “Most of the time, we find that the thing that probably happened? Is the thing that did happen.”

So eventually I turn around and see the San Rafael Bridge—which I just walked under, so I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s there—and then I understand what must have happened.

Because you might not know. You might drive across the bridge and toss a bottle over the rail never guessing that people walk and ride horses below. Or you might say to yourself, “This bottle could fall to the bottom of the arroyo and hit someone in the head, which is O.K. by me.”

The dogs want to get going. Either they’ve already forgotten the bottle or they’re worried that another one might be on the way. But I tell them to stay, and I pick up the bottle and hold it in the sunlight. It’s empty but still cold. Blind Street Ale is what it held.

I wonder what the dogs would have done if the bottle had knocked me out. Perhaps they would have stood by until I woke up, as Lassie would have if Jeff, or later Timmy, had been hit by a beer bottle. It’s just as likely, though, that they’d have run off into the trees. Because they have their own agendas. Tag’s a wirehaired Jack Russell whose life mission is to create an empire of the places where he has peed. Raleigh is a very small beagle with round golden eyes and enormous ears—homely, yet somehow profound. Her goal is to follow every odd scent she comes across—and there are, it seems, a lot of them—slowly and at length. Sometimes Tag will pee, and Raleigh will want to stop and smell that, and I’ll think, or even say out loud, “Well, kids, we’re not going to get anywhere at this rate.”

Now we head home, where the A.C. is cranking, the blinds are down in the bedroom, and Ingrid has the blanket pulled up to her chin. She’s an aerospace engineer in La Cañada and the spacecraft Phaethon has just landed on Mars. The reason for the mission is secret—she can’t tell anyone what it’s about, not even me.

She tends to get migraines every time some phase of her work comes to an end. I sit on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her forehead. Her hair is damp but her skin is cool.

“How was your walk?” she says, without opening her eyes.

“It was O.K.,” I say.

“This is the worst part,” she says. “I think it’ll break soon.”

“Do you want some Coke?”

“It’s all gone.”

“Coffee?”

“Gone.”

So I run hot water on a washcloth, wring it out, and carry it back to the bedroom. I lay it on her forehead and press down.

“You’re an angel,” she says.

“No, you are. Everybody else is celebrating and here you are. It’s not fair.”

“I’m not worried about that, Bobby,” she says. “I can celebrate another time.”

We have lived in California for three years and Ingrid likes the state very much. She was born on a farm in South Dakota. It’s abandoned now. Every few years, Ingrid goes back to take a look, even though all that’s left is the old bleached shell of a house, surrounded by blue grama grass and tall trees with pale bark and waxy leaves. You can’t go upstairs anymore, because the steps have crumbled, but you can still stand outside and look up at her old bedroom window.

Starbucks coffee is good for Ingrid’s headaches, so I head back out to buy her the biggest one they have. Then I drive to the liquor store on DeLacey and buy two litres of Coke.

“Just soda tonight?” Mr. King says.

He is short and round with a red face and bright eyes. We like him, and his liquor store. We always get him a scarf or something at Christmas, because even in Southern California you sometimes need a scarf.

“Do you carry Blind Street Ale?” I ask.

Mr. King nods. “We hardly sell any of it, but we do have it. It’s strong, and it’s twelve bucks a quart.”

“Anyone buy some lately?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

I tell him what happened in the arroyo.

He shakes his head and looks disappointed in humanity. “I never heard of such a thing.”

“My idea,” I say, “is to figure out who did it and talk to them. Not angry, necessarily, but just so they know.”

“Quite right,” Mr. King says. “Prevent it from happening again.”

“I figure I might be able to—find them, I mean—because it’s such an obscure brand.”

“I’ve tasted it,” he says. “It’s obscure for a reason.”

“Maybe I’ll try some.”

It’s dark by the time I get home. We live on a winding street with houses on one side, opposite a steep dense bank of ivy. All the houses have path lights in the grass. I really like them for some reason, these low modest lanterns lighting up when night comes down.

Tag and Raleigh are lying on the kitchen table looking out the window when I drive up. Tag stands and wags his tail so hard that the table shakes, and he yodels as he always does when he sees someone he knows outside. If he doesn’t know you, his reaction is much worse. Once, a dog trainer came to the house, and he said, “Tag is not aggressive; he’s just got a tremendous amount of adrenaline.”

I take the coffee in and set it on Ingrid’s night table. She’s snoring lightly, but when she wakes up she’ll be glad to see it, hot or cold.

Then I go back to the kitchen, open the bottle of Blind Street, and pour some into a heavy glass goblet sort of thing. There isn’t much foam, which I take to mean that the bottle sat on the shelf for a long time.

The ale is flowery, with a tranquillizing undercurrent. I drink it while reading the newspaper in the dining room. After two glasses, I’m sort of drunk. Gravity comes alive—I can feel it on my arms and shoulders, pulling me down.

Ingrid comes out of the bedroom now with her coffee. She sits at the table and plucks the collar of her shirt from her neck with both hands. She has straight brown hair parted in the middle and dark crescent eyes and a full lower lip that gives a strong sense of composure to her face.

“I feel better,” she says.

“Thank God,” I say.

And I mean it. I hate it when she’s sick. The house gets all dark and quiet—it’s as if time had ceased to function.

“Not dizzy anymore,” she says.

“Let’s play cards,” I suggest.

“What are you drinking?”

I explain about the bottle and the bridge.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “You pick up some bottle off the ground and now you’re drinking from it?”

“No. Hell no. I got this at Mr. King’s.”

“What’s it like?”

“I think you’d say it was complex.”

“Good old Mr. King,” Ingrid says.

We play three hands of Russian bank. She shuffles the cards one-handed. I don’t know how she can do this, but she can.

“I could’ve been killed by that bottle,” I say.

“Nothing can happen to you,” she says. “You’re the voice of Milo Hahn.”

This is a reference to my work. I read out loud in a recording studio for a living. Commercials, books on tape, a few other things. Once, I even did the voice-activated response system for a tree-service conglomerate. “Do you want one tree planted? Say yes or no. Do you want more than one tree planted? Say yes or no. Do you want one tree removed?” And so on. Tedious to record, let alone to hear on the phone, I’m sure. I have no doubt that voiceactivated response systems are making the nation a dumber place, but the money was very good.

I also do the Milo Hahn mysteries. Milo Hahn is a private investigator who travels around the United States in a camper pickup unravelling sordid deals. That’s why I talked to the detective I mentioned before—to get some background. Not that I really needed it just to read the books. The author writes three a year, and the titles are all plays on state slogans. Alaska was “Beyond Your Dreams, Within Your Nightmares,” Connecticut “Full of Deadly Surprises.”

Usually, I record at a studio in Glendale. If Martians were to land here and build their conception of an Earth city, I suspect it would look like Glendale: the open streets, the trees that line up a little too well, the eccentric and vaguely futuristic architecture.

Today I’m finishing “It Must Be Murder,” a mystery set in Maine. It concerns a woman who wants Milo to find her son. Only he’s not really her son, as it turns out, but one of the world’s most ingenious cocaine thieves—until, that is, his corpse washes up on a rock, where seals keep trying to shove it off, which you can understand, because it is their habitat.

“I used to be happy,” I read. This is Milo talking to himself at the end of the book. “I’d roll into town, grill a steak, drink some Lagavulin, and watch the sun go down. Now I don’t know. Now I can’t chase out of my mind the crazy lies that people convince themselves of and then try to sell me. And for what? So that I’ll find the answers? Make their stories true? Are you kidding me? There ain’t no answers, people—that’s what I want to say. No answers, no true stories. There’s only the highway and a full tank of gas and a call on my cell phone from some guy in Baltimore, who’s got a bit of a nasty problem and thinks maybe I can help. And the hell of it is, maybe I can.”

(The reference to Baltimore, see, will direct the audience to the next book, set in Maryland. The series goes in alphabetical order.)

I look up. Terry Finn is on the other side of the glass. He runs the sound board and lines up the jobs. He got into an accident last spring while riding his motorcycle on the Angeles Crest Highway, and had to have reconstructive surgery on his shoulder. Now he can’t lift his left arm over his head.

“You nailed it, Bobby,” he says. “Morose, yet optimistic. Only it was just maybe a little too fast.”

“Oh, you always say that,” I tell him.

“Well, you always rush the ending.”

“You know, this is in your mind. You hear what you want to hear.”

“Hey,” he says, “I wish I did.”

This is what Milo Hahn would do about the bottle of Blind Street Ale. He would set a fire in the Dumpster at Mr. King’s liquor store, and while everybody was outside trying to put it out he would rifle through the records. Milo Hahn is a master of rifling, and a combustion expert; he’s constantly setting diversionary fires. When he found what he was looking for, he would rip it out of the ledger. (This is what I find troubling about the books: Milo always finds what he needs to find; in life, when you look for things, you’re usually looking in the wrong place.) Later, Mr. King would probably turn up murdered, which would tip Milo off to the fact that the case was more complicated than it had at first appeared.

Terry says, “Just read from the break.”

So I do.

“ ‘Here’s your money,’ Mrs. Cahill tells me. She’s wearing an astrakhan jacket in the parking lot of an Arby’s and not looking too much at home. ‘And a little something for your college fund.’

“It’s a stack of hundreds, the fresh kind, sharp as a razor, coated with the bitter powder of the vault.

“ ‘I guess this seals the deal,’ I say. It’s a crummy joke and I don’t care if she gets it or not.

“But she does, all right. She gets it. Her eyes flash like the tail-lights of a Maserati Spyder fresh off the lot, cash on the barrel, no questions asked.

Rosemary, the herb, grows around one of the trees in our front yard, and a couple of nights later I’m cutting it back. We cook with the stuff, but you can’t really cook fast enough to keep up with the growth of rosemary. The dogs are on long leads that aren’t tied to anything, but they don’t realize that, so they’re just hanging around. The phone rings and I go inside. It’s Ingrid.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“My Place.” That’s what she calls Mi Piace, in Old Town. It’s a big, open restaurant with white tablecloths and vast cold Martinis.

“Go ahead and eat,” she says. “We haven’t even ordered, so it’ll be a couple of hours.”

“You’re celebrating,” I say.

“The Phaethon has landed.”

“Another one?”

“No, the same one.”

“What’s it doing?” I figure she might tell me, since she sounds a little looped.

“It’s talking.”

“Oh yeah? To who?”

“I’ve said too much already.”

I tell her to call me when she wants to come home, and I put the phone down, though the rosemary resin on my fingers makes them stick to the receiver.

When I go back outside, Raleigh is gone. Tag lies in the grass looking melancholy. His leash is wrapped around the A.D.T. Security sign. I put him in the house and go down the street calling for our mindless little beagle. Three houses away, I see her on the high cantilevered roof of someone’s garage looking down at me with big yellow eyes. Because the houses on our block are built into ledges, this is not as great an accomplishment as it seems. Still, I’m impressed.

I walk the length of the garage, and in the short distance from the front to the back the yard climbs to a bank of ground cover that’s flush with the roof. Raleigh seems surprised to see me on her level when I was down on the street a minute ago.

Luckily, no one comes out of the house. I rescue my dog and carry her home under my arm like a football.

An hour later, the phone rings again. It’s Mr. King this time. Four bottles of the ale I was asking about went out this morning. He heard about it but didn’t see it happen. He gives me the name and address on the check.

The mission seems a little specious now, but I don’t mind having something to do. So I sit down at my desk and write:

Dear Neighbors,

Last Tuesday a bottle of Blind Street Ale was thrown from the San Rafael Bridge into the Arroyo Seco. As luck would have it, no harm was done. But the bottle barely missed a man and his dogs. Who can say what will happen next time? The arroyo is for the use and enjoyment of walkers and joggers and equestrians. It is almost one hundred per cent free of debris, either airborne or stationary. Let’s keep it that way.

I look the letter over and change the period after the last sentence to an exclamation point.

Let’s keep it that way!

It seems less hostile somehow.

Then I drive to the address Mr. King gave me, a house in a quiet neighborhood off Linda Vista. It’s one of those big Craftsman places that seem to be perpetually under renovation. Scaffolding rises on all sides, giving the house the look of a great sailing ship in drydock.

I park near the mailbox and get out of the car and put the letter halfway in the slot so that whoever lives here will see it. While I’m doing this, a deep-green sports car—a Maserati, as it happens—comes around the corner and stops next to my car.

“Are you here about the environment?” the driver says. He is a man in his fifties, maybe, wearing a blue shirt with “Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles” printed in white.

“No,” I say. I take the letter from the mailbox and carry it over to him. “There was a . . . well, you can read it.”

He begins to do so and then he looks up.

“My daughter drinks this Blind Street,” he says.

Then he goes back to the letter.

“Where it says ‘a man and his dogs,’ would that be you?”

I nod. “Probably a lot of people drink it,” I say. “It doesn’t mean she was the one.”

“One way to find out,” he says. “She lives in the carriage house.”

“Well, you can ask her.”

“No, come along,” he says. “She doesn’t see that many people. It’ll do her good.”

We drive up to the house, then get out and walk around to a split-shake barn with an apartment upstairs. The path lights here are little Mission lanterns with sea-green brass and yellow mullioned glass. Very sharp. I tell him so.

The man turns with a pragmatic flatness to his mouth, as if he had just thought of something. His eyes are deep-set, his crewcut like iron filings.

“Do I know you?” he says.

“I don’t think so.”

“You seem familiar.”

“Ever listen to the Milo Hahn mysteries on audio?”

“No, I’m not familiar with those,” he says. “I know what it is. You work for those guys—the tree people.”

“I’m the voice on their phone system. I don’t really work for them.”

“No kidding. You do voices.” He nods, thinks this over. “That can be interesting, I imagine.”

“Oh, it’s like anything. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not.”

“Can you do Jimmy Stewart?”

“No. I don’t do voices that way.”

“I know, I’m just kidding,” he says. “I’m going to go see if she’s around. But, whatever she says, don’t get mad at her, all right? She can’t stand that.”

“It’s no bother.” He turns toward the barn and half shouts the rest. “You’ve gone to the trouble to make a flyer and we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

He goes inside and is in there for some time. I walk across the lawn to a gazebo where there’s an easel and a painting. The painting is dark and hard to figure out, but as I look closer I see that it must be the yard as it appears at night. The paint has been applied in thick slabs of black and midnight blue and it looks wet, as an oil painting in a museum might. I touch it—I’ve always wanted to do this—and I find that it is, in fact, still wet. I leave the gazebo and wipe my fingers on some ferns.

They’re still in the carriage house. Raised voices bump like bats at the windows, but I can’t hear anything specific. Don’t get mad at her, you said so yourself, I think. I figure that Ingrid’s probably calling me to come and get her by now, and here I’ve wandered into this weird family scene. Then the door opens.

She’s older than I expected. Late twenties or more, I’d guess, in a stringy sweater with red and white stripes, overlong sleeves, and one of those collars whose points sit way out on the shoulders. Her fingers clamp the cuffs of the sweater to the palms of her hands. Her nails are short and jagged, and from the marks around them I determine that she is the night painter.

“I dreamed that God came and said it was time for me to go,” she says.

There is a wooden bench nearby with a blue-handled garden shovel leaning against the seat. The father goes over and picks up the shovel and lays it on the bench. Then he picks it up again and puts it on the grass under the bench.

“Is that how we said we’d start?” he says.

Her eyes close, press tight, and open. She chews on her thumbnail and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes the color of slate.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I never thought it might hit someone. I’d had a really bad day. That doesn’t excuse it, I know. See, because I dreamed that God came into my room like the mailman, and he had these orders for me in his pouch, and he said that I would die. And I said, ‘But I’m young,’ and he said, ‘In your heart, you are not all that young.’ I woke up crying, I couldn’t stop, because it seemed so real.”

“Mariana,” the father says.

“But I don’t mean to lay all that on you. Then I drove around drinking Blind Street in the sun, and I threw the bottle out when it was empty, and I drove all the way to Zuma, and walked up and down on the sand, listening to the water, and then I came back. And I felt good then, better than I had in a long time. Because I thought, You know, I’m not going anywhere. And I never thought for a minute about anyone in the arroyo.”

“Though you should have,” the father says.

“Yes. I should.”

“And?”

She rolls her eyes and breathes out so forcefully that the wings of her nostrils flare. “And will, in the future.”

“Because you’ll . . . what will you do?”

“Think.” She nods her head. “I will think.”

“Look, it’s not the end of the world,” I say. “It’s just a bottle. We’ve all thrown bottles out of cars, I’m sure, at one time or another. That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“You don’t know me,” she says.

“No, that’s for sure. But you’re honest. You could’ve said, ‘Me? I didn’t do anything.’ A lot of people would have said that. And that counts for something. Now, I think I’ve made too much of this, and I have to go.”

Mariana takes my hand in both of hers. “My apologies again,” she says.

From their house I drive straight to Mi Piace. Ingrid and her pals are at a cluttered table in the back. I know them; they know me. There are plates and glasses and cups and saucers all mixed up on the table, and they’ve pushed back their chairs because the meal is over. The help hovers nearby, dressed in black.

“Where you been, man?” Ingrid says. “I called you. Come sit by me. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen the ghost of Jacob Marley.”

I pull up a chair. “I found out who threw that bottle,” I say.

“You and that bottle, my God,” she says. “It’s like your constant companion.”

“What bottle is this?” Else Nelson, the director of the team, says.

“Oh, somebody threw a bottle at Bobby in the arroyo. It’s all he thinks about.”

“Who threw it?”

“A woman,” I say.

“Why?” Else says.

I look at him. For a scientist, he looks sort of ramshackle: unshaven, jowly, with the mysterious light of extreme knowledge in his eyes.

“You tell me what you’re doing on Mars,” I say, “and I’ll tell you why she threw the bottle.” ♦